James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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Monday, May 16, 2011

Here’s a painting called “Admiration” by Vittorio Reggianini (1858-1938).

A mishandling of perspective unintentionally gives it a funhouse quality. If you dropped a marble on the floor, it looks like it would roll off to the right.

The problem is that it goes into two point perspective when it should be treated as a one-point perspective picture.

A basic rule of thumb is that if the main vanishing point is within the central third of the picture, the other set of lines should stay horizontal. If that distant vanishing point were placed way over near the side of the picture, the lines in the floor and the window mullions could begin to slant a bit.

Traditionally, the couple in the foreground would be the subject of the painting and the artist has painted it that way, with the attention to detail, etc given to them. The window and floor lines draw you that way like they are 'supposed' to. Then like a pinball, suddenly your eyes are drawn to the background scene by the black-line perspective and the dog's posture and you realize the women in the background are not really looking at the couple as first surmised, but at a painting that is hidden from our view. The fact that the second perspective converges within the painting makes us realize that this second scene is where the real action is taking place. It makes me REALLY want to know what is in that hidden painting.

Echoing Caey's remark, and to expand on my earier one - I can find no logic for the angle of the carpet and the off-horizontal edges of the tile. Aside from the perspective of the farther scene (which appears to be the correct perspective to me), that front-scene perspective just looks blatantly off.

Good observations, everyone. Tom, to answer your question, I should explain that, technically speaking, any time the vanishing point inside the picture moves from the dead center of the picture, the other sets of lines will start to converge ever so slightly at first.

You can see it happening on a camera's viewfinder in a street scene (or a supermarket is a perfect place to check this out). The "horizontals" start to converge as soon as the camera is no longer pointing straight down the aisle. But the degree of that convergence is very small, and it increases only slightly. The degree also depends on how wide angle the camera is.

So the rule of thumb is an approximation, really. This stuff is a bit hard to explain without pictures, so if you're confused, don't worry.

I'm still perplexed (as I think you are too)as to why using 2-point perspective looked or felt right to this painter. It almost seems (as someone mentioned earlier) that it had to be intentional. Misguided, IMHO, but (probably) intentional.

I drew inumerable wonky scenes like "Admiration" before discovering this rule on my own.

However, I think there's another solution besides switching to 1-point perspective. You could add a THIRD vanishing point to the right of the existing two (probably off-canvas) and use curvilinear perspective. In other words, the straight lines of the tiles and the carpet would appear to subtly curve, swooping down from the left and up again towards the right.

Nowadays, this technique is mostly associated with comic books and would have been totally inappropriate for a painting like Reggianini's. When handled badly, curvilinear perspective can have the appearance of photographic distortion, even look as if you are viewing the scene through a fisheye lens.

Nevertheless, I think it's a valid technique and have seen it used in paintings from the 15th century!

I try to use Gurney-style vision science when thinking about perspective issues. My own eyeballs have an extremely limited area of focus, and I can only obtain "the big picture" by moving them around in my skull to focus on different parts of the scene. But I also swivel my head on my neck, and some scenes (like an enormous landscape panorama) I can only take in by moving my head. It's scenes like these in which "gimmicky" curvilinear perspective is actually best at mimicking the experience of visual perception.

Additionally there appears to be a third set of converging lines deliberately painted on the column in the background (also converging with the draperies) that, after staring at the painting this long, seems to be a huge flashing arrow saying "LOOK HERE". Not perspective lines per se, but it does pull your eyes away from the foreground couple, seeming to imply that that's what the artist was trying to do. The artistic version of a bait-and-switch. "Ha! You thought I was going to illustrate the admiration between a couple in love, but really I was illustrating the admiration of art."

Why am I critiquing this painting so much? I'm a physicist, not an artist. ;)

In all seriousness, I think that Audran may be on to something. James: do you know for sure that this reproduction wasn't shot, and then cropped at an off angle? It seems to me that tilted so the carpet edge is horizontal, it reads right...(not having tried that experiment yet myself, I confess...)

Ibisbill, I'm glad you mentioned Rackstraw Downes, because he's doing some interesting things with "fish-eye" or curved perspective. Where the field of view is taking up more than 90 degrees of viewing angle. A painter can go beyond a wide-angle lens in such things, and some of the other comments have alluded to this idea. Good topic for another post, perhaps.

Very insightful post (as usual), James. It appears that Reggianini was a champion of this kind of beautiful optical wrongness. A quick search reveals another example: http://www.allartclassic.com/pictures_zoom.php?p_number=229&p=&number=REV022